What I find interesting (but not at all suprising) is that Monopoly has not had a mention.

It's a cool premise, but there is no end game other than a grinding and inevitable outcome. It's just boring. Alternative? House rule - set either a time limit or a turn limit.

Scrabble and chess are my favorites. When I was little, on rainy days when we were house bound, my Mom would give my brother and I graph paper and we would play Battleship, except we called it Salvo. Then Milton Bradley came out with the game. I was like, Gee, we missed the boat on that one (pun intended).

There are a number of active groups, here in Houston, Texas, that play boardgames regularly. Some post on MeetUp.com. There is a group meeting every Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday that I know of, and others on a monthly basis.

A few years ago, a friend of mine invited me to the monthly Mensa game party (no longer active) and then some private groups. It seemed to have exploded since then.

Personally, I prefer games of abstract geometry, such as Blokus, Octiles, Quirkle and Ingenious. The Mensa group played these more often than the other groups. Some groups are big on the Euro style games, such as Puerto Rico, Settlers of Catan, etc.... There are also some groups that play the simple social games, like Uno, Cards Against Humanity and "Apples to Apples".

For these groups, the internet has made it easy for strangers to get together to play these games. While 10-20 people meet almost every day to play these games, that's not really a lot of people overall. Certainly not compared with the thousands that play video/computer games today.

No fooling around here capturing chips, it was Warfare Strategy, Big Avalon Hill and Gamers Workshop Fan, I used to have over 30. My fancy was WW2 and tanks warfare. From the grand daddy "Tactics" to everything else like "Squad Leader", "Panzer Leader", "Arab-Israeli Wars", even a game based on movie "Platoon". Now I have the time and the solitude the games are gone.

The best of both worlds.